Galileo's Dream (42 page)
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
That night he woke Cartophilus and dragged him out to the telescope.
“What's going on?” he demanded. “This is new. This didn't happen before!”
“What do you mean?”
“You knowâeverything that has been happening this year, I've felt it as if it had already happened. It's been hell. But this, Barberini becoming popeâit's new! I had no premonition.”
“That's strange,” Cartophilus said, thinking it over.
“What does it mean?”
Cartophilus shrugged. He met Galileo's gaze. “I don't know, maestro. I'm here with you, remember?”
“But did you not know what happened, before you came back as a Gypsy? Don't you remember this or not remember this?”
“I don't remember if I remember right or not, anymore. It's been too long.”
Galileo growled, and raised his hand to cuff the man. “You lie.”
“Not at all, maestro! Don't hit me. I just don't know. It's been too long.”
“But you came to me with the Ganymede, you stay with me and watch me, you don't go back to Jupiterâand you say you don't know?” He bunched his fist.
“I stay here because I have nowhere else. Cartophilus has to play his part. And now I'm used to it. I like it. It's home. The sun, the wind, the trees and birdsâyou know. This is a real place. You can sit in the dirt. You yourself have noticed how
removed
they are up there. I don't think I can go back to that. So, I'm stuck. I have nowhere that is really mine.”
They stared at each other in the darkness. Galileo let his arm fall.
Everything now changed. The Linceans were overjoyed at the opportunity that this new pope represented, what they called a
mirabile congiunture
. They begged Galileo to finish his treatise, which he was now calling
Il Saggiatore
. It was the word used to describe those who weighed gold and other valuablesâ
The Assayer
âbut Galileo meant more than that by it, hoping to suggest the kind of weighing done by those who put all nature on the balance, like Archimedes.
The Experimenter
, one might say, or
The Scientist
.
But The Assayer too, sure. In this case, he was weighing Sarsi's Jesuitical arguments, and finding them wanting. Knowing Pope Urban VIII would be one of the readers of his bookâits ultimate reader, its recipient, one might sayâhe began to write in a more literary and playful style, pastiching the pope's own liberal writing. He considered what he loved in Ariosto, and took pains to do similar things. He had long since understood that all these debates were a kind of theater, after all.
If Sarsi wants me to believe with Suidas that the Babylonians cooked their eggs by whirling them around in slings, I will do it, but I must add that the cause of this cooking of the eggs was very different from what he suggests. To discover the true cause, I reason as follows: “If we do not achieve an effect which others formerly achieved, then it must be that in our operations we lack something that was part of their success. And if there is just one single thing we lack, then that alone can be the true cause. Now we do not lack eggs, nor slings, nor sturdy fellows to whirl them; yet our eggs do not cook, but merely cool down faster if they happen to be hot. And since nothing is lacking to us except being Babylonians, then being Babylonians is the cause of the hardening of the eggs, and not friction of the air.” And this is what I wished to discover. Is it possible that Sarsi has never observed the coolness produced on his face by the continual rush of air when he is riding post? If he has, then how can he prefer to believe things related by other men as having happened two thousand years ago in Babylon, rather than present events which he himself experiences?
Sarsi says he does not wish to be numbered among those who affront
the sages by disbelieving or contradicting them. I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?
Finally Sarsi is reduced to saying with Aristotle that if the air ever happened to be abundantly filled with warm exhalations in the presence of various other requisites, then leaden balls would melt in the air when shot from muskets or thrown by slings. This must have been the state of the air when the Babylonians were cooking their eggs. At such times things must go very pleasantly for people who are being shot at.
Ha ha! The Linceans laughed; they loved passages like this when Galileo sent them along for revision and approval. This was the first time Galileo had ever submitted drafts of a book to a committee of fellow philosophers, and though he found it frustrating, it was interesting as well. It was going to be a statement with the imprimatur of the Academy of Lynxes; it would have their backing, and with that it would enter the Roman intellectual wars, where the new was now battering the old into the ground. Cesi begged him to finish the book, and then come to Rome and rout the Jesuits utterly. Cesi would publish it in the name of the Linceans, and had already had the title page altered so that the book would now be dedicated to Urban VIII.
Good surprises kept happening. Cesarini was made an official member of the Academy of the Lynxes, and four days later the new pope made him a cardinal. So a Lincean was now a cardinal! And the pope also appointed his own nephew Francesco to be a cardinalâthat very same Francesco whom Galileo had just helped to obtain a teaching position at the university in Padua!
Galileo began to believe Cesi: this was indeed a
mirabile congiunture
. It might even be possible to get Copernicus taken off the list. So he wrote more of his treatise every day. He sent letters to Cesi and the other Linceans, promising to finish the revisions they had suggested to him. Cesi had the publication scheduled in Rome. He urgently wanted Galileo to come to the capital. Galileo wanted it too. He made
the request to Picchena to be allowed to go, and after some hesitations, Picchena and the Medici lady regents agreed to the plan. So preparations for another trip to Rome were made, and the book was almost finished.
Near the end of
Il Saggiatore
, the first book Galileo had published since the ban of 1615, he dispensed with the sarcastic attacks on Sarsi, and made some philosophical points that were new. These would come back to haunt him later:
I must consider what it is that we call heat, as I suspect that people in general have a concept of this which is very far from the truth. For they believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed. Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape, as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary qualities. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.
Very deep stuff, and strangelyâeven suspiciouslyâahead of its time; although at the same time, far behind the Jovians' understanding of things. Galileo knew perfectly well that he was describing his state of mind before Aurora's tutorials; that was something he wanted to do here, just to clarify his thoughts in their evolution. He wrote as he had always written. That it was also true that what he was calling effects of consciousness extended beyond heat and tickling and taste and colors to fundamental qualities like number, boundedness, motion or rest,
location or timeâthat was something he knew but still could not feel. It remained a conundrum to him, part of the feeling of anachronism always disorienting him.
That these sentences
of Il Saggiatore
could be construed as denying the reality of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into Christ's body and blood, during the sacrament of Communionâthat they were, in other words, according to the Council of Trent and the doctrinal law of the Holy Church, heretical statementsâdid not occur to Galileo, or to any of his friends and associates.
But it did to some of his enemies.
In the midst of all this excitement, and Galileo's preparation for another journey to Rome, the weekly letter would arrive from Maria Celeste:
As I have no bedroom of my own, Sister Diamanta kindly allows me to share hers, depriving herself of the company of her own sister for my sake. But the room is so bitterly cold, that with my head in the state it is in these days, I do not know how I will be able to stand it there, unless you can help me by lending me a set of those white bed-hangings which you will not want now. I should be glad to know if you could do me this service. Moreover, I beg you to be so kind as to send me that book of yours which has just been published, so that I can read it, as I have a great desire to see what you have said.
These few cakes I send are some I made a few days ago, intending to give them to you when you came to bid us adieu. Sister Arcangela is still purging herself, and is much tried by her remedies, especially the two cauteries on her thighs. I am not well myself, but being so accustomed to ill health, I do not make much of it, seeing too that it is the Lord's will to send continual little trials like this. I thank Him for everything, and pray that He will give you the highest and best felicity. To close I send you loving greetings from me and from Suor Arcangela.
Sire's Most Affectionate Daughter,
S. M. Celeste
P.S. You can send us any collars that want getting up.
Galileo heaved heavy sighs as he read this. He arranged to have blankets sent over to the convent, and with them a letter asking Maria Celeste if there was anything else he could do. He was sure to go to Rome sometime soon to meet with the new pope, he told her. He could ask the Sanctissimus for something for the convent, perhaps some land to generate income; perhaps a direct endowment, or some simpler form of alms. What did she think the nuns would like most?
Maria Celeste wrote back to say that alms would be very well, but what they needed most was a decent priest.
Galileo cursed when he read this. “Another priest. They need food!”
Her letter went on to explain:
Since our convent finds itself in poverty, as you know, Sire, it cannot satisfy the confessors when they leave by giving them their salary before they go. I happen to know that three of those who were here are owed quite a large sum of money, and they use this debt as occasion to come here often to dine with us, and to get friendly with several of the nuns. And, what is worse, they then carry us in their mouths, spreading rumors and gossiping about us wherever they go, to the point where our convent is considered the concubine of the whole Casentino region, whence come these confessors of ours, more suited to hunting rabbits than guiding souls.
Galileo couldn't be sure if she knew what hunting rabbits meant in Tuscan slang, or if she actually meant hunting rabbits; but he suspected the former, and laughed, both shocked and pleased at her sophistication.
And believe me, Sire, if I ever began telling you all the absurdities committed by our present confessor, I should never be done, for they are as numerous as they are incredible.
She was so smart. Surely she was her father's daughter, for the acorn never fell far from the tree (except when it did, as with his son). Indeed it sometimes seemed to Galileo that Maria Celeste was the only sane and competent nun in the entire convent, carrying the other thirty on her slim shoulders, every day and every night: supervising
the cooking, nursing their ills, making their preparations, writing their letters, and keeping her sister out of the wine cellar, which apparently was a new problem to add to all Arcangela's others. Maria Celeste's letters to Galileo were almost always written in the seventh or eighth hour of the day, which began at sunset, meaning she was getting only a couple of hours of sleep before the bell rang for compline, and their predawn prayers would begin. The relentless routine was beginning to tell on her, Galileo could see when he took his baskets of food over. She had no meat on her bones, there were always dark rings under her eyes, and she complained of stomach trouble; she was losing her teeth; and she was just twenty-three years old. He feared for her.
